Midnights Children

this …” But the someone, the something, cries in a loud startling (and startled?) voice, “Jesus Christ Almighty!” (Amid the cut-glass vases, my grandfather laughs apologetically heh-heh, for mentioning the infidel name.) “Jesus Christ Almighty!” and my grandfather looking, and seeing, yes, there are holes in hands, perforations in the feet as there once were in a … But he is rubbing his eyes, shaking his head, saying: “Who? What name? What did you say?” And the apparition, startling-startled, “God! God!” And, after a pause, “I didn’t think you could see me.”
    “But I saw Him,” my grandfather says beneath motionless fans. “Yes, I can’t deny it, I surely did.” … And the apparition: “You’re the one whose son died”; and my grandfather, with a pain in his chest: “Why? Why did that happen?” To which the creature, made visible only by dust: “God has his reasons, old man; life’s like that, right?”
    Reverend Mother dismissed us all. “Old man doesn’t know what he means, whatsitsname. Such a thing, that gray hairs should make a man blaspheme!” But Mary Pereira left with her face pale as bedsheets; Mary knew whom Aadam Aziz had seen—who, decayed by his responsibility for her crime, had holes in hands and feet; whose heel had been penetrated by a snake; who died in a nearby clocktower, and had been mistaken for God.
    I may as well finish my grandfather’s story here and now; I’ve gone this far, and the opportunity may not present itself later on … somewhere in the depths of my grandfather’s senility, which inevitably reminded me of the craziness of Professor Schaapsteker upstairs, the bitter idea took root that God, by his offhand attitude to Hanif’s suicide, had proved his own culpability in the affair; Aadam grabbed General Zulfikar by his military lapels and whispered to him: “Because I never believed, he stole my son!” And Zulfikar: “No, no, Doctor Sahib, you must not trouble yourself so …” But Aadam Aziz never forgot his vision; although the details of the particular deity he had seen grew blurred in his mind, leaving behind only a passionate, drooling desire for revenge (which lust is also common to us both) … at the end of the forty-day mourning period, he would refuse to go to Pakistan (as Reverend Mother had planned) because that was a country built especially for God; and in the remaining years of his life he often disgraced himself by stumbling into mosques and temples with his old man’s stick, mouthing imprecations and lashing out at any worshipper or holy man within range. In Agra, he was tolerated for the sake of the man he had once been; the old ones at the Cornwallis Road paan-shop played hit-the-spittoon and reminisced with compassion about the Doctor Sahib’s past. Reverend Mother was obliged to yield to him for this reason if for no other—the iconoclasm of his dotage would have created a scandal in a country where he was not known.
    Behind his foolishness and his rages, the cracks continued to spread; the disease munched steadily on his bones, while hatred ate the rest of him away. He did not die, however, until 1964. It happened like this: on Wednesday, December 25th, 1963—on Christmas Day!—Reverend Mother awoke to find her husband gone. Coming out into the courtyard of her home, amid hissing geese and the pale shadows of the dawn, she called for a servant; and was told that the Doctor Sahib had gone by rickshaw to the railway station. By the time she reached the station, the train had gone; and in this way my grandfather, following some unknown impulse, began his last journey, so that he could end his story where it (and mine) began, in a city surrounded by mountains and set upon a lake.
    The valley lay hidden in an eggshell of ice; the mountains had closed in,
to snarl like angry jaws around the city on the lake
… winter in Srinagar; winter in Kashmir. On Friday, December 27th, a man answering to my grandfather’s description was seen, chugha-coated, drooling, in the vicinity of the Hazratbal Mosque. At four forty-five on Saturday morning, Haji Muhammad Khalil Ghanai noticed the theft, from the Mosque’s inner sanctum, of the valley’s most treasured relic: the holy hair of the Prophet Muhammad.
    Did he? Didn’t he? If it was him, why did he not enter the Mosque, stick in hand, to belabor the faithful as he had become accustomed to doing? If not him, then why? There were rumors of a Central Government plot to